Effective Leadership And Styles

By Otti Kasie Jude

ABSTRACT
Professional literature on leadership mostly states how a leader should be in terms of personality traits and describes what leaders do in their everyday practice or how they do it. Effective leadership should be seen more widely and explored deeply from the perspective of those styles that makes for effectiveness. Leaders are manifested externally through their work. The research project aims to explore the various styles of leadership that promotes effectiveness in leaders.

It also aims to provide an evaluative insights on what leaders do and ought to do in order to justify effectiveness in leadership. The finding will help reveal important activities on which best leaders focus and determine which elements are really important for leadership. The data collected for the project was through a combination of interviews conducted with leaders and people in senior management position along with a questionnaire survey.

Our findings points to the fact that the most cherished styles of leadership are the charismatic and transformational styles of leadership. They are both effective and productive. Although other styles have some useful hints to offer. Nevertheless, the above two stands out effectively.

INTRODUCTION
Leadership is a complex concept. The importance of leadership in an institutional administration is far reaching and can hardly be over emphasized. In spite of the numerous studies and writings on the subject, there is yet to emerge a universally accepted definition. As pointed out by Stogdili, (1974) there are almost as many different definition of leadership as there are persons who have attempted to define it. However, a look at some of these various definitions will show that the concept of influence is often emphasized.

Leadership is considered as a relationship between two parties in which a super-ordinate ensures a significant influence on the behaviour of the other towards achieving a common goal. According to North house (2016) leadership is a process through which an individual influences a group of people to attain common goals.
Contemporary leaders do not rely upon their legitimate powers to persuade individuals to do as they are told but they take an interest in an interaction with their subordinates or they raise and widen the interests of their subordinates. It is about behaviours an observable set of skills and abilities and is the art of mobilizing others to want to struggle for shared aspirations (Jim and Pozner 1987) Davis (1967) states that leadership is a part of management but not all of it. It is the ability to persuade others to seek defined objectives enthusiastically. He considers leadership as a human factor which binds a group together and motivates it towards goals.

According to the Singapore Productivity Association (SPA, 2010) Leadership is a social influence in which an individual manifests and gains the support of other persons in achieving a common goal. In leadership, someone has to play a role in influencing, followers in order to achieve organizational goals. A leader is mostly seen as a complex entity, equipped with features that make him or her ideal for the role of a leader.

To have an effective leadership in a given society or company, there is need to provide rules or regulations to people and to provide rules or regulations to people and to delegate a life that influences the followers to attain laid down objectives (long et al 2012). Hence leadership has a link with the power of the person managing a place and leaders are seen as people with a wide myriad of outstanding traits of character and personality. Cho et al (2016) stated that it is
a process, a means and not an inborn characteristic but it is a communication between leaders and their followers.

This project would pursue the objective of exploring various styles of leadership that promote effectiveness in leadership as well as provide evaluative insights on what leaders do or ought to do in order to justify effectiveness in leadership.

The major reason for various enterprises or organizations to survive is to set up objectives which they coordinate effectively and motivate their workers by an effective leader in order to achieve desired goals. Unfortunately, some organizations do not take cognizance of the leadership style adopted by these managers (Ojokuku et al 2012) A true leader is a person that engages others with their considerations and modesty because they involve themselves in what they are actually doing not for individual gains but for the benefit of the organization (Mintzberg, 2010).

If an organization needs to secure its success, its labour force needs to be inspired to put themselves in the mission and vision of the organization and effectiveness can be achieved if workers are stimulated as such effective organization require effective leadership. (sur, 2016). The performance of an organization will suffer in direct proportion to the neglect of this effective leadership (Fiedler and House 1988).

Ultimately, it is the individual employee who either performs or fails to perform a task. For an organization to achieve maximum performance, each employee must set aside his personal goals, at least in part, to strive for the collective goals of the organization (Cummings & Schwab 1973).

LITERATURE REVIEW THEORIES OF LEADERSHIP
Under the theoretical review, the theories and approaches relating to leadership had been broadly classified into three. These include the Trait theories, the Personality-behavioural theories and the situational or contingency theories. The major propositions of the proponents of each of these theories are summarised below:

THE TRAIT THEORY
This theory is build on the premises flat leaders are “born and not made” this among other things implies that some attributes are naturally endoured in potential leaders at Birth which are not
acquired or got by any other means. It is also referred to as the “great man theory of leadership”.

Most studies on leadership traits focused extensively on identifying intellectual, emotional and physical characteristics of successful leaders for instance, Stogdili (1974) in a review of thirty three (33) studies found that there is a general trend that leaders are more intelligent than followers but extreme intelligence differential between leaders and followers may be dysfunctional. Stogdili further emphasized that the average person who occupies a position of leadership exceeds the average member of his group in the followership category in respect of social activity, scholarship, dependability, responsibility, high originally and socio-economic status.

Under this theory, the personality trait such as alertness, integrity, originality and self confidence are associated with effective leadership (Argyris, 1955) Ghiselli (1963) also found that initiative, ability to act and initial action independently and self-assurance are associated with effective leaders.

The Behavioural Theory of Leadership
The general dissatisfaction with the trait approach to the study of leadership motivated management scholars to shift their attention to the analysis of the actual behaviours of leaders. The two major pedagogical advantages of this method as pointed out by Halplun (1969) are

1. It is possible to deal directly with the observable phenomena and make no a priori assumption about the identity or structure of whatever capacities may or may not understand these phenomenon; and

2. It enables one to understand how leaders behave and the effectiveness of such behaviour in respect of specified performance criteria.

The behavioural theory seeks to explain leadership not on the basis of what leaders are, but in terms of what they do so as to identify the relationships, which exist between behavioural pattern and work group performance. Similarly, the behavioural approach sought the “one best” style of leadership that would be effective in all situations and ignored situational factors.

SITUATIONAL/CONTINGENCY THEORIES
The criticisms that flooded the Trait Theory and behavioural approach made the scholars to consider the situational theories. With this, opinion shifted from “leaders are born” to “leaders are made not born”. The situational approach attempts to identify distinctive characteristics of a setting to which the leaders behaviour can be attributed.

Tannebaun and Schmidt (1973) quoted in Adepoji (1998) identified three variables to be considered in choosing leadership patterns as follows:

1. Forces in the manager such as value system, confidence in subordinate and personal characteristics.

2. Forces in the subordinate such as high need for independence, willingness to accept responsibility, etc; and

3. Forces in the situation such as the type, organization, the problem itself the pressure of time and group effectiveness.

In the word of Vroom (1983) and Stoner (1978) the focus of the situational theories is that the situation with which a leader finds himself will dictate his actions or behaviour. They argued that no theory could be regarded as the best, hence the situation would determine the course of action, for the singular fact that total dependant on situational factor for leaders to act could truncate or impede progress of the organization; therefore scholars submitted that rather than applying a single method of leadership, a combination of approach referred to as contingency theory suffice. Contingency approach emphasizes that different leadership traits and skills are required in different situations. There are various theories emanating from contingency approach such as the path- goal theory but it will not be described here in detail. Looking at all these theories, none considered alone will yield maximum effect but a combination of all will give desired result.

Leadership styles:
Leadership style simply can be described as the manner by which a leader presents himself or herself before the followers. It described the kind of relationship which exists between the leader and the led, usually in decision making and flow of communication. Leadership is the life wire of an organization and it cannot be
overemphasized with so many definitions of leadership, an understanding can be gotten from these varieties of definitions. In modern leadership theories, seven leadership styles have been presented, including
i. Charismatic leadership

ii. Transactional leadership

iii. Transformational leadership

iv. Bureaucratic leadership

v. Democratic leadership

vi. Autocratic leadership and

vii. Laissez-Faire leadership Ojokuku et al (2012)

Charismatic leadership
By far the most successful trait-driven leadership style is charismatic. Charismatic leaders have a vision as well as a personality that motivates followers to execute that vision. As a result, this leadership type has traditionally been one of the most valued. Charismatic leadership provides fertile ground for creativity and innovation, and is often highly motivational. With charismatic
leaders at the helm the organization’s members simply want to follow. It sounds like a best case scenario.

There is however, one significant problem that potentially undercuts the value of charismatic leaders: they can leave. Once gone, an organization can appear rudderless and without direction. The floundering can last for years, because charismatic leaders rarely develop replacements. Their leadership is based upon strength of personality. As a result, charismatic leadership usually eliminates other competing strong personalities. The result of weeding out the competition is a legion of happy followers, but few future leaders (Michael 2010).

Transactional leadership
The wheeler-dealers of leadership styles, transactional leaders are always willing to give you something in return for following them. It can be any number of things including a good performance review, a raise, promotion, new responsibilities or a desired change in duties. The problem with transactional leaders is expectations or a desired change in duties. Transactional leadership style is defined as the exchange of rewards and targets between employees and management (Howell & Avolio, 1993). The transactional leader is good in integrating and reconciling the organizational needs with the needs and expectations of the group.

Transformational styles
Transformational styles focuses on the development of followers and their needs. Managers exercising transformational leaderships style focus on the development of their skills (Ismail et al 2009). Transformational leadership act as a bridge between leaders and followers to develop clear understanding of follower’s interest, values, and motivational level. It basically helps the followers to achieve their goals working in the organizational setting. It encourages followers to be expressive and adaptive to the new and improved practices and changes in the environment (Bass 1994).

Transformational leadership is such an engaging and inspiring relationships between the leaders and subordinates that enables subordinates to seriously examine the current assumptions and inspire to think across new directions (Krishnan 2012) it causes the subordinates to give their appreciation, loyalty, obedience and trust
to their leaders and to assign tasks without any questioning (Yuki, 2006).

Autocratic Leaders
Autocratic leaders are classic, “do as I say” types. Typically, these leaders are inexperienced with leadership thrust upon them, in them, in the form of a new position or assignment that involves people management. Autocratic leaders retain for themselves the decision making rights.

They can damage an organization irreparably as they force their followers to executive strategies and services in a very narrow way based upon a narrow subjective idea of what success looks like. There is no shared vision and little motivation beyond coercion. Commitment creativity and innovation leadership.

In fact, most followers of autocratic leaders can be described as biding their time, waiting for the inevitable failure. This leadership produces ineffectiveness and the removal of the leaders follows inevitably (Michael, 2010).

Bureaucratic leadership
Bureaucratic leaders create and rely on policy to meet organizational goals. Policies drive, executive, strategic objectives and outcomes. Bureaucratic leaders are most comfortable relying on a stated policy in order to convince followers to get on board. In doing so, they send a very direct message that policy dictates direction. Bureaucratic leaders are usually strongly committed to procedures and processes instead of people and as a result they may appear aloof and highly charge adverse. The specific problem or problems associated with using policies to lead are not always obvious until the damage is done. The danger here is that leadership’s greatest benefits, motivating and developing people are ignored by bureaucratic leaders (Michael, 2010).

Democratic leadership
Tannenbanum and Schmidt, (1958) describe democratic leadership as one where decision making is decentralized and shared by subordinates. The potential for poor decision making and weak execution, however, significance here. The biggest problem with democratic leadership is its underlying assumption that everyone has an equal state in an outcome as well as shared levels of expertise with regard to decisions. That is rarely the case while democratic leadership sounds good in theory. It is often bogged down in its own slow process, and workable results usually require an enormous amount of effort.

Laissez-Faire Leadership style:
This leadership style allows complete freedom to the group and individuals in the organization to do their wishes. It is characterised by indecision, vacillation and indifference about the responsibilities (as leader and supervision) to achieve organization goals and objectives with a loose leadership style is often difficult, if it is possible at all it is devoid of rules and regulations but the leader supplies materials.

Findings
From the interviews conducted among Senior Management Leaders as well as data gathered through questionnaire, indications point strongly to three leadership styles as the styles that produces effective leadership especially when they are combined in various settings and situations. It has been earlier emphasized in theory building that no single theory is the best, similarly, no are single style of leadership is the best. Situations and the kind of leaders dictate the style appropriate to such situation.

Charismatic Transactional and Transformational Styles of leadership are projected as effective leadership styles. Let us also bear in mind that no matter how good a style is, it still has its merits and demerits. A charismatic leader builds on charisma, the transactional leaders understands the organizational needs and expectations of the group and integrates as well as reconciles the two. The transformational leaders develops the skills of his followers which ultimately bears on the achievement of organizational goals and objectives.

The Laissez-Faire and autocratic styles are not favoured by the interviewed. These two styles pitch on extremity and the environments they engender does not offer effective leadership and achievement of organizational goals.
Conclusion

In our contemporary world, leadership styles, roles and effectiveness are highly needed in order to achieve organizational goals of productivity. Good working atmosphere should be created between workers, management and the task environment for the actualization of the mission and vision of an organization. Thus can affect the quality of work, life and productivity.

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